Other overseas adventurers are notable for their unrelenting ambition. Rob Carlin launched Superior Wellness from his Chesterfield bedroom just over a decade ago, when he imported a container of Chinese hot tubs. It was an untapped niche in a market then dominated by US models. Today, he aims to become the biggest hot tub brand globally.

Carlin now has a purpose-built facility in China, producing around 20,000 hot tubs a year. His 250 distribution partners span the UK, Europe, USA and Canada. Turnover hit £57 million in 2022, and around 50 per cent of sales come from outside the UK.

Yet still he’s not ready to sit back and soak. “I want us to keep growing,” he says. “I want to open an HQ in the US, a $1 billion market. We’ve got so much more we can still do.”

These leaders don’t seem to recognise any limits. And why should they? With modern ecommerce and logistics platforms, anything is possible, as long as they’re armed with a compelling proposition and the ability to execute their ideas.

In 2014, Alan Rock launched Moasure, an innovative motion-based measuring tool that can calculate distance, area, elevation and volume. Mo Hussain joined Rock in 2018 and the pair targeted a global customer base from the very beginning, using a contract manufacturer and third-party logistic providers.

“The eventual market size is every home in the world,” says Rock. Despite starting out with “just a few of us in Warwick”, as many as 70 per cent of Moasure’s initial crowdfunding pre-orders came from the US. Today, the EU is its second-biggest market and only around 5 per cent of sales come from the UK. The pair launched a site in German in 2021, and last year launched four other language sites, Italian, Spanish, French and Dutch.

“As an entrepreneur, you need to have a vision, to be able to execute it, and to ignore the naysayers,” says Rock. “Plus there’s a certain satisfaction in proving wrong the experts in the field, who told me that it would never work.”